Help with using external hard drive with Insignia Blu-Ray Player NS-WBRDVD!

[charr83]

I recently purchased the Insignia Blu-Ray Player NS-WBRDVD because of the wi-fi so I could connect to my netflix account. It has a USB Port, so I am trying to hook-up my external 120 GB hard drive so I can put all my DVDs on the hard drive. From what I can find out, it looks like the player only recognizes my 2GB thumb drive because it is formated to FAT16. I tried to format the 120GB drive to FAT32 but it can't recognize it. Is there any way around this? Am I doing something wrong? Do I have any options?

[oldfart13]

This player won't play a file larger than 2GB. Will probably need a firmware upgrade. Have you checked at Insignia? Their forum might be able to help:

http://www.insigniaproducts.com/home.html

[jman98]

I got curious, so I looked at the user manual found via oldfart13's link. Unless I missed it, I couldn't find any explanation of what format it requires for USB playback. However, the documentation seems clear that this device is expected to be used with flash drives and not USB drives. One of the problems that USB disk drives may have is that yours may need its own power source to work with this player. Does your drive have its own power source? FAT32 should work fine and NTFS may even work, so I'm guessing that your problem is not really a format issue. Many devices that can play files off USB attached devices cannot provide enough power via USB for anything above a thumb drive to work. Let us know if your disk drive has its own power supply or not. One guy posted recently in another thread that sometimes smaller form factor drives can get enough power to work via USB on some devices so I throw that out in case it is useful to you.